Copyright

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How about pointing out Blackboards dubious business practices and patent applications/litigations:

* On October 17, 2000, Blackboard Inc. filed a complaint with the World Intellectual Property Control against a company called Cupcake Patrol for control of the domain name “Blackboad.com”.
* In April 2003, the company sued student hackers and security researchers Billy Hoffman and Virgil Griffith for publishing, and planning to present, a paper highlighting security flaws in their Blackboard Transaction System.
* On January 17, 2006, Blackboard was granted US patent 6,988,138 on “Internet-based education support system and methods” (with other multinational patents having been issued or pending) with claims over features of course management systems (U.S. Patent 6,988,138 ).
* On July 26, 2006, the company issued a press release regarding its patent portfolio and on that day filed a lawsuit against Desire2Learn(D2L), another course management system provider, for patent infringement, using the above patent to assert its rights under US patent law. The Complaint was filed in Federal Court in the Eastern District of Texas, Lufkin Division, a rural East Texas judicial district. Desire2Learn have posted a Patent Information page which comprehensively documents Blackboard’s complaint against them.
* After the announcement of the lawsuit against Desire2Learn, some in the elearning community felt that the patent award ignored prior art on elearning and distance education and started a Wikipedia page, History of virtual learning environments, and a Moodle Docs wiki page, Online Learning History, to document the extant examples of course management systems.
* Because of concern over the patent claims, some in the elearning community protested by calling for a boycott of Blackboard. See, for example, BoycottBlackboard.org. A web site against education patents, with a lot of information about the patent has been created: Noedupatents.org.
* On 9 August 2006, a complaint was filed against Blackboard, Inc. by Portaschool of Atlanta, GA in the United States District Court of the Northern District of Georgia for deceptive business practices, and knowingly and willingly misrepresenting themselves in a patent application.
* On January 25, 2007 it was announced that the Software Freedom Law Center was successful in its request that the United States Patent and Trademark Office re-examine the e-learning patent owned by Blackboard Inc. The request was filed in November 2006 on the behalf of Sakai, Moodle, and ATutor. The Patent Office found that prior art cited in SFLC’s request raises “a substantial new question of patentability” regarding all 44 claims of Blackboard’s patent. Groklaw, a website that tracks legal issues generally related to Open Source software, has the press release: Groklaw.org
* On February 1, 2007, Blackboard announced via press release “The Blackboard Patent Pledge”. In this pledge to the open source and do-it-yourself course management community, the company vows to forever refrain from asserting its patent rights against open-source developers, except when it is itself sued for patent infringement.
(from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard_Inc.#Blackboard_legal_issues)

… basically, they’re just not nice and should you be giving your money to them? With Moodle, as in a lot of Open Source solutions while there may not be a huge reduction in overhead costs associated with moving to an Open Source platform, although in this case I’d argue that there probably are some … at least the $ your organisation spends floats around in the local economy rather than just heading directly northwards. I sometimes throw in a little bit about what all the tax dollars Blackboard has to pay off of our investment go towards in the USA… but you can figure that one out for yourself and weigh up your own moral/political compass 😉

Think it boils down to cost and control. Moodle costs little and provides maximum control – for lecturers and developers. Bb costs the earth and you are locked in to ‘their way’. I think it is worth considering Bb’s business practices and corporate culture…..
Moodle actually more closely mirrors the way teachers work in f2f classrooms. It’s an easier adjustment for staff new to elearning. Bb and the big boys are great for sophisticated pre-loaded content for training that needs to be auto-tracked and assessed, with the option of no or little facilitation.

But Leigh – what about the home made NZ LMS – forget its name. Derek Chirnside will know it. Have never heard anything but good things about it, And they give it away free.

Pumice. I’m with you on the corporate badness of Bb.. dunno if its an issue for those who decide how to spend the money here though.

Interesting to note that the naccq link in the comment before this one – is a paper by staff at Otago Polytechnic. Haven’t read it thoroughly, but I suspect it was influential in Otago’s decision to run with Bb.. like I said, haven’t read it yet – may turn out to by pro Moodle..

James. I reckon it would be better in a wiki. I’ll let this flow for a bit and then transfer it all to a wiki. Good suggestion regarding the Del.icio.us tag. bbmoodle it is hey.

I use Manhattan Virtual Classroom (personally) for a number of network adminstartor reasons. One of the guys who uses it with me used to do presentations for blackboard and although he rates the blackboard product he is realistic regarding it price – he really liked what is know as adapted release which allows individual student programmes based on response. He does like Manhattan virtual classroom because of its simplisitic use and because its free. Other LCMS i would rate inclue Atutor, interact, drupal, moodel and caroline

not sure the overheads for moodle are that great. our college has a hosting agreement with them and they put together a package for us that included some training as well.

the whole thing seems pretty bullet proof with no outages that i am aware of and the odd small technical glitches we’ve had have been fixed within a few hours of us reporting them.

the moodle community has a huge repository of stuff. everything from courses to how tos to high level techie info. very very helpful.

its really easy to import / export material from/into a number of formats, including shaggy’s tpu stuff.

whilst not having used them myself, i do know that there are numerous plugins available, multiple language support, full customisation etc etc etc and ultimately – if you want to go down the path – its free.

my experience of blackboard is limited to my interaction with it as a uni student but i do think thast compared with moodle it is crap.

its not intuitive, the interface is clunky, it is regularly unavailable (this may be the fault of the university hardware????) , the capacity to interact with other users is only available through some dodgy looking forums, and it is (i understand) flippin’ expensive.

hi Leigh
having been well-involved in Moodle development in NZ, I now find myself at a ‘Bb’ institution (shock/horror :). But I’m finding that for current levels of teachers’ (if I can use that word-that-shall-not-be-used 🙂 understanding of pedagogy, there is very little difference between the two. Most will use an LMS in a reflex way to continue a transmission model of teaching. Even with the social constructionist affordances of Moodle, I would say (from experience and speculation) that a majority of courses worldwide on Moodle would be based on that paradigm…. Bb has ‘building blocks’ available that allow for blogs/wikis/etc (I’m experimenting with these at the moment) but unless the underlying assumptions change the LMS will be continue to be used to perpetuate the dominant approach…

To cut a long story short – comparisons between LMSs / VLEs always tend to focus on features, which merely perpetuates the technological bias. Very few studies focus on the underlying assumptions about learning that inform the design of these systems. This is where the debate needs to go imho….

So is it just Moodle vs. Blackboard? How about looking at other open source solutions like OLAT (http://www.olat.org). A Swiss java-based open source LMS worth looking at… (ok, I work with OLAT so I am a little biased but still, there is not just Moodle out there…)

[…] and relatively simple to integrate into other systems. I am not alone in my view of Moodle’s advantages. If the old premise that a better mouse trap will cause a path to be beaten to your door held true, […]

Leigh,
You should really actually read 2005 Dave’s paper, but if you don’t, here is most of the conclusion:
“The students seem to prefer Moodle to Blackboard on most counts”
“Moodle has some interesting features. The fact that constructivist thinking is designed into the tool, rather than as an afterthought, is a good thing. Some further development is necessary before the product would be adopted by choice by the instructor in this trial but these features appear to be currently in Beta”
“While Moodle is free to acquire and use, administration and maintenance costs are often more significant than purchase (Brown & Eis 2003). However, in this case Moodle appears to be relatively straight forward to run. All of those involved in the project were impressed by Moodle and continue to consider its place as a resource within the learning environment.
We are recommending to our e-learning team that the product shows significant potential and should be seriously considered for further investigation.”

Thanks Samuel, I did read Daves paper and forwarded it onto our IT manager back in July 4. Unfortunately the recommendation made to OP leadership was to continue using Bb for another 12 months at least. I haven’t seen the recommendation or the minutes of the meeting but I have heard that cost was quoted.. 16 grand for Bb and 18 grand for a hosted Moodle (seems like someone running Moodle is making a lot of money out of people’s ignorance)…

To my mind, in this day and age, both systems are out of date and we need to be considering so much more!! and if 16-18 grand per year is the real cost of running an olden style LMS.. then it makes no sense.

A friend and colleague in Australia who manages the NSWLearnscope project pointed me to Servage.com

For AU$100 per YEAR!!! you get one click installs of the likes of WordPress and MediaWiki – and yes they are one clicks, I tried – 360 gig of storage and some huge figure on bandwidth. At that price we could afford to buy accounts for every department, have for more capability and still save money.

18 grand for Moodle.. they must be tripping. $100 for a long list of CMS options, includes online support (but using MediaWiki and WordPress the support is EVERYWHERE), huge bandwidth and storage, software that is constructivist by its very nature.. hmph! what are we doing!!?

There’s also the problem of how well implemented it is. I’m at a BB university at the moment and there isn’t really that much material or usefulness in all bar one of my subjects to give me much incentive to go on there (usually only to check what to do for my assignments)